ALL Volvos Will Be Electrified by 2019; Twitter Predicts Situations Before Police Reports Come in

Volvo has announced they will offer electrified versions of every model starting in 2019. Cnet.com reports that by that model year, there won’t be any Volvo without some degree of electrification. Some will be hybrids, with gas engine plus electric, some will be total e-vehicles. Volvo says this is in response to customer demand. They would be the only company besides Tesla to offer electrification across their entire line.

New research from Cardiff University, which examined 1.6 million tweets from the London 2011 riots, has noticed that Twitter can be used to detect dangerous situations up to an hour faster than police reports. According to mashable.com, researchers wrote event detection algorithms that use various features of Twitter data — like sentiment, frequency of tweets containing certain words, and geolocation and timing of the tweets. They discovered they were able to map out real-time disruptive events from five minutes to an hour before the Met Police were aware of them. They believe this prediction element could be used to help first responders and emergency services before the threat escalates. The down side? An argument that “predicting” some kind of activity before it escalates could lead to a Minority Report-kind of scenario, in which law enforcement intervenes to curb freedoms of assembly or interfere with freedom of speech. [There was a big outcry a couple years ago in San Fransisco where WiFi was killed to underground BART stations so moving protesters couldn’t use social media to communicate.] The scientists claim their research works at an aggregate level so really only flags events once there is sufficient ‘noise’ around a certain event, avoiding identifying individuals in a effort to retain privacy.